Blue Origin launches huge rocket carrying twin #NASA spacecraft to #Mars.

The 321-foot (98-metre) New Glenn blasted into the afternoon sky from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending NASA’s twin Mars orbiters on a drawn-out journey to the red planet. Liftoff was stalled four days by lousy local weather as well as solar storms strong enough to paint the skies with auroras as far south as Florida.

In a remarkable first, Blue Origin recovered the booster following its separation from the upper stage and the Mars orbiters, an essential step to recycle and slash costs similar to SpaceX. Company employees cheered wildly as the booster landed upright on a barge 375 miles (600 kilometres) offshore. An ecstatic Bezos watched the action from Launch Control.

“Next stop, moon!” company employees chanted following the successful booster landing.

New Glenn’s inaugural test flight in January delivered a prototype satellite to orbit, but failed to land the booster on its floating platform in the Atlantic.

The identical Mars orbiters, named Escapade, will spend a year hanging out near Earth, stationing themselves 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometres) away. Once Earth and Mars are properly aligned next fall, the duo will get a gravity assist from Earth to head to the red planet, arriving in 2027.

Once around Mars, the spacecraft will map the planet’s upper atmosphere and scattered magnetic fields, studying how these realms interact with the solar wind. The observations should shed light on the processes behind the escaping Martian atmosphere, helping to explain how the planet went from wet and warm to dry and dusty. Scientists will also learn how best to protect astronauts against Mars’ harsh radiation environment.

“We really, really want to understand the interaction of the solar wind with Mars better than we do now,” Escapade’s lead scientist, Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, said ahead of the launch. “Escapade is going to bring an unprecedented stereo viewpoint because we’re going to have two spacecraft at the same time.”

It’s a relatively low-budget mission, coming in under US$80 million, that’s managed and operated by UC Berkeley. NASA saved money by signing up for one of New Glenn’s early flights. The Mars orbiters should have blasted off last fall, but NASA passed up that ideal launch window — Earth and Mars line up for a quick transit just every two years — because of feared delays with Blue Origin’s brand-new rocket.

Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the world, New Glenn is five times bigger than the New Shepard rockets sending wealthy clients to the edge of space from West Texas. Blue Origin plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lunar lander on a demo mission in the coming months aboard New Glenn.

Created in 2000 by Bezos, Amazon’s founder, Blue Origin already holds a NASA contract for the third moon landing by astronauts under the Artemis program. Elon Musk’s SpaceX beat out Blue Origin for the first and second crew landings, using Starships, nearly 100 feet (30 metres) taller than Bezos’ New Glenn.

But last month NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy reopened the contract for the first crewed moon landing, citing concern over the pace of Starship’s progress in flight tests from Texas. Blue Origin as well as SpaceX have presented accelerated landing plans.

NASA is on track to send astronauts around the moon early next year using its own Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket. The next Artemis crew would attempt to land; the space agency is pressing to get astronauts back on the lunar surface by decade’s end in order to beat China.

#China’s stranded astronauts ‘in good condition’ after space debris delays planned return.

The three astronauts on the Shenzhou-20 mission are facing a delayed return to Earth after their scheduled Nov. 5 return was aborted after their spacecraft was believed to have been struck by a small piece of space debris.

The return has been pushed back to an unspecified date, but the mission team is carrying out tests and drills, according to a statement issued by the space agency.

“The Shenzhou-20 crew is in good condition, working and living normally,” the statement said.

The three astronauts — Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie — travelled to the Tiangong space station in April and were finishing their six-month rotation.

The replacement Shenzhou-21 mission successfully docked with the space station on Nov. 1, carrying for the first time a group of mice for experiments.

China has made steady progress with its space program since 2003. It has built its own space station and has a goal of landing a person on the moon by 2030.

GHGSat continues to expand its methane-monitoring constellation

TAMPA, Fla. — AST SpaceMobile has registered plans with international regulators via Germany for a sovereign, space-based network that would provide broadband directly to devices across Europe, the U.S.-based satellite operator said Nov. 7.

The network would be operated by Luxembourg-based SatCo, a joint venture AST announced in March with European telecoms giant Vodafone.

Vodafone, one of AST’s investors, has already agreed to provide cellular spectrum that would enable the low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation developer to launch services in 10 countries, pending regulatory approval.

SatCo is seeking to provide a pan-European service with 2 gigahertz S-band spectrum that’s due for renewal in the region in 2027, alongside 700 megahertz public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) frequencies.

Viasat is currently using S-band for its hybrid satellite-cellular European Aviation Network, while EchoStar plans to sell off its global Mobile Satellite Services spectrum to bolster SpaceX’s Starlink direct-to-device (D2D) offering.

For clues to the future of military space, look in the air.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Logistics, from #satellite life extension to in-space assembly, will become common elements of future military operations, according to speakers at the MilSat Symposium here.

WASHINGTON — A startup plans to test technology to produce semiconductors in space on a series of Falcon 9 launches using payloads attached to the rocket’s booster.

Besxar announced Oct. 28 it signed a launch agreement with SpaceX to fly payloads on 12 Falcon 9 missions that could begin before the end of the year. The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement.

Unlike typical Falcon 9 customers, Besxar will not place payloads into orbit. Instead, each of the 12 launches will carry two “Fabship” payloads attached to the boosters, which will return to Earth with the boosters when they land less than 10 minutes after liftoff.

The payloads, each about the size of a microwave oven, are designed to test systems Besxar is developing to produce semiconductor wafers in the vacuum of space.

“I’d like to believe we’re taking a bit of a different approach,” Ashley Pilipiszyn, Besxar’s founder and chief executive, said in an interview. “One of the things that we realized is companies like SpaceX have figured out launch and reentry really well and on a repeatable basis.”.


Those initial Fabships, which the company calls “Clipper-class” payloads, are primarily intended to test whether semiconductor materials can safely launch and land.

“This is pretty much the ultimate egg drop challenge,” she said. “We wanted to ensure that not only could we get wafers to and from space and do all these wonderful things with them and do deposition, but can we actually reliably bring them back without warpage, cracking, anything like that.”

Booking a dozen flights, Pilipiszyn said, enables the company to rapidly iterate on the Fabship design, including reusing hardware. She compared the Clipper-class payloads to SpaceX’s “hopper” prototype for Starship, which tested takeoff and landing technologies.

“That is really, I think, a different way of thinking about the space economy,” she said. “It’s not just price per kilogram, it’s how many times you’re launching and what your turnaround time is.”

The 12 missions are expected to take place over the next year. Pilipiszyn said she expects the company to learn enough from the series to move into a new phase of missions but did not disclose details.

While many space manufacturing ventures aim to exploit microgravity, Besxar is focused instead on vacuum conditions. That, she said, could enable the purity required for semiconductor fabrication without the enormous expense of recreating such conditions on Earth.

Pilipiszyn noted that semiconductor manufacturer TSMC plans to spend $50 billion on a new fabrication plant for advanced chips. Much of that cost, she said, comes from the equipment and processes needed to maintain ultra-clean environments, something that space could provide naturally.

“The vacuum of space is really key for us,” she said. “Microgravity is a benefit. It’s not like it does anything negative, but it’s not the core offering.”

Besxar, based in Washington, D.C., has “more missions on contract than employees,” Pilipiszyn said. The company has raised an undisclosed amount from “strategic angel” investors as well as institutional backers. That funding, she said, is enough to complete the Clipper-class series of missions on SpaceX launches.

“We view ourselves as an American semiconductor manufacturing company that happens to work in space, versus a space company as we typically think about them,” she said. Besxar’s goal, she added, is to use space to improve semiconductor manufacturing and keep the U.S. competitive with #China.

“One of the things we’re really striving to champion is that in-space manufacturing is American manufacturing and really just part of this larger supply chain,” she said.

A suggestion made last week by acting #NASA administrator Sean Duffy that SpaceX could be booted from the agency’s upcoming moon-landing plans has rocked the space industry.

Now, behind the scenes, pitches for alternate paths to the lunar surface are quietly starting to take shape.

SpaceX currently has a US$2.9 billion contract to prepare its gargantuan Starship rocket system to ferry astronauts to the moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Artemis III mission. However, citing delays in Starship’s development and competitive pressure from China, NASA asked SpaceX and Blue Origin — which holds a separate lunar lander contract with the space agency — to submit plans to expedite development of their respective spacecraft by October 29. Both companies have responded.

But the space agency is also asking the broader commercial space industry to detail how they might get the job done more quickly, hinting that NASA leadership is prepared to sideline its current partners.

CNN spoke with half a dozen companies about how they plan to respond to NASA’s call to action, which the agency will formally issue once the government shutdown ends, according to a source familiar with the matter.

While some of the potential proposals appear more straightforward than the current moon-landing plan that uses Starship, each involves constructing and testing new spacecraft designs, a process that typically takes at least six or seven years, noted Casey Drier, the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society.

This could pose an issue for NASA’s timeline. China aims to land its astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030, and Duffy has repeatedly indicated he views beating China as a national security imperative.

Artemis III is currently slated to happen as early as mid-2027, and NASA has signaled that the current pace of Starship development is threatening to push that target months or years into the future.

“There’s a certain part of the moon that everyone knows is the best,” Duffy said, referring to the moon’s largely unexplored south pole region — the target landing site for NASA’s Artemis III astronauts.

“We have ice there. We have sunlight there. We want to get there first and claim that for America,” he said in August.

Experts who spoke with CNN for this article said that reevaluating SpaceX’s lunar lander contract could be wise. Spending years to develop an entirely new spacecraft could still potentially be faster, some argued, than waiting for Starship, which presents extremely difficult engineering challenges due to its sheer size and unprecedented design.

Still, SpaceX has ticked a few boxes that might give it a significant leg up on the competition. Though in light of NASA’s broader lunar ambitions, experts say the real contest is about much more than speed.
More power, more problems

Touted as the most powerful rocket system ever built, Starship has launched on 11 eye-popping suborbital test flights, relighting engines in space, reusing boosters and demonstrating the ability to deploy satellites along the way.

Inside #NASA’s scramble to find a backup moon plan — and the wild ideas companies are pitching

How to spot November’s supermoon, the closest of the year. The moon’s orbit around the Earth isn’t a perfect circle, so it gets nearer and farther as it swings around. A so-called supermoon happens when a full moon is closer to Earth in its orbit. That makes the moon look up to 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than the faintest moon of the year, according to NASA.

November’s supermoon is the second of three supermoons this year and also the closest: The moon will come within just under 222,000 miles (357,000 kilometres) of Earth.

Tides may be slightly higher during a supermoon because the moon is closer to Earth, said astronomer Lawrence Wasserman with Lowell Observatory. But the difference isn’t very noticeable.

No special equipment is needed to view the supermoon if clear skies permit. But the change in the moon’s size can be tough to discern with the naked eye.

“The difference is most obvious as a comparison between other images or observations,” said Shannon Schmoll, director of Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, in an email.

Supermoons happen a few times a year. One in October made the moon look somewhat larger, and another in December will be the last of the year.

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Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

#NASA takes one step closer to launching quiet supersonic jets. A supersonic jet plane designed to make very little noise took flight for the first time this week, cruising over the southern California desert just after sunrise in what could be the first step toward much faster commercial travel, according to NASA.

NASA and the U.S. weapons and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin successfully tested a jet Tuesday that is capable of travelling faster than the speed of sound.

Aircraft have been capable of flying at supersonic speeds since the 1940s. The problem is that ultra fast planes are banned for commercial travel over land because they make an explosive — and frightening — “sonic boom” that disturbs the public.

The supersonic aircraft Concorde, operated through British Airways and Air France, made transatlantic flights starting in the 1970s. But those were halted in 2003 after a fatal crash three years earlier tanked demand for the expensive service.

If NASA and Lockheed Martin can successfully lower the volume, the new jets could slash travel time between places like New York City and Los Angeles roughly in half, opening up an entirely new air travel industry.

The X-59 is capable of flying faster than the speed of sound with what Lockheed Martin described as only a “gentle thump.” Tuesday’s test flight was still slower than the speed of sound and was intended primarily to test the plane’s structural integrity. Still, it was celebrated as a significant step toward the widespread use of supersonic travel.

The compact, 100 foot (30 metre) plane launched from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, about 60 miles (100 km) north of Los Angeles, coasted over the desert and landed near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center about 40 miles (64 km) away.

The first airplane to move faster than the speed of sound — or 767 mph (1,235 kph) — took off nearly 80 years ago in 1947, according to NASA. But flights at that speed were banned over land in the United States soon in response to polling. Residents complained that the noise reverberated through large cities, rattling windows and startling the public.

NASA and Lockheed Martin have for years been working on a solution that would circumvent the noise and lead to regulatory change, in large part to make commercial supersonic travel within the United States possible.

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Safiyah Riddle, The Associated Press